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'Ray, this is a religion': How Bridgewater lost two top hires

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Re: 'Ray, this is a religion': How Bridgewater lost two top hires

#111

Post by dogman144 »

TMWNN wrote: post #103
steveBK123 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people think of this in too much of a binary fashion. Hunches vs Quant. It's really more of a continuum. Or you could broadly tranche into 4 categories - 1) pure hunches, 2) pure quant ML stuff (I don't know what this signal even means, but computer say number go up), 3) hunches that you validate with data (kind of like the scientific process), and 4) the reverse - quant ML/data that you validate with logic/…

>A lot of people think of this in too much of a binary fashion. Hunches vs Quant. It's really more of a continuum. People say the same thing about fundamental analysis versus technical. It's not a binary; everyone is both, and only vary on how much they lean to one side.

It’s the same except that your avg tech/fund. analyst isn’t sitting on 10gb private fiber global data networks.

Hunches and quants tend to work when you have that much data and compute firepower.

Setup is closest akin to what insurance and social media companies run. When you have that data and speed, you’ll do well. Secret isn’t the IP, it’s having access to the infra that can make use of it.

Siren Servers/Jaron Lannier describes it in generalities well.

Re: 'Ray, this is a religion': How Bridgewater lost two top hires

#112

Post by jvanderbot »

lesuorac wrote: post #96
throw3823423 wrote: post #63

I worked with Ferrucci in BW. The internals of the employee rating system that preceded him were hilarious. In short: Everyone is encouraged to rate anyone else in a variety of categories, as often as possible. Every rating is public. You know who is rating you, and how they did it. Those ratings are put together to get a score in every category, and can be seen by anyone. It's your Baseball Card. The problem is that…

> My high credibility makes someone else have bad credibility, which changes the rankings again. How many iterations do we run before we consider the results stable? Tangential to your point but this is actually a solved problem and you only have to run once. You might even recognize the solution [1] [2]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eigenvalues_and_eigenvectors

More generally factor graph optimization / msg passing, if you don't need the constraint that it must be an eigenvector/eigenvalue operation. The number of iterations is bounded by graph width but is locally constant, if memory serves.

Re: 'Ray, this is a religion': How Bridgewater lost two top hires

#114

Post by lmm »

wolverine876 wrote: post #85
com2kid wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The idea was supposedly that everyones ideas were valid and hierarchy didn't matter and that everyone should challenge anything no matter who they were in the organisation. On the engineering side, ideally this is how things are done anyway. I've never had a problem digging into the ideas presented by engineers more senior than me, and I've always encouraged junior engineers to question any ideas I present. Everyon…

Conflict will happen if it's a truly honest system. If there's no conflict, people are not telling the truth about things that cause conflict. Does it happen, and how does the system handle it?

When someone has made an honest mistake, exposing that is not a source of conflict. The conflict only arises when the "mistake" wasn't honest, but rather the person was being dishonest about their goals from the start.

Re: 'Ray, this is a religion': How Bridgewater lost two top hires

#115

Post by TheCleric »

yen223 wrote: post #41

"Dalio would often review the results in his office ... chewing on Scotch tape, as was his habit when he was concentrating..." This article really buried the lede here

Yeah the rest of it can be chalked up as narcissistic business personality, but this? This is psychotic. A billionaire chewing on scotch tape.

Re: 'Ray, this is a religion': How Bridgewater lost two top hires

#116

Post by atoav »

throw3823423 wrote: post #63

I worked with Ferrucci in BW. The internals of the employee rating system that preceded him were hilarious. In short: Everyone is encouraged to rate anyone else in a variety of categories, as often as possible. Every rating is public. You know who is rating you, and how they did it. Those ratings are put together to get a score in every category, and can be seen by anyone. It's your Baseball Card. The problem is that…

Another aspect of this kind of system is that it favours visible over invisible jobs. The people working their asses off in the technology sewer might literally keep everything running, but because they are:

A) underfunded and understaffed

B) have no time and energy for niceties

all those in more comfy positions might be inclined to vote against them, while they probably don't vote at all because they got no time for that shit.

As you said, if you let a pidgeon vote on how good your chess moves were you will get pidgeon shit on a chessboard. A costly form of bureaucratic performance art, sans the art.

Re: 'Ray, this is a religion': How Bridgewater lost two top hires

#117

Post by passion__desire »

pavlov wrote: post #94
passion__desire wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prediction markets : Have a system where people can make predictions in semi serious fashion in any field, record them with reasoning and probability numbers and match them later on. Atleast this will prove how deeply they know about a field they are interested in. Tagline: Prediction is Intelligence

How do you compare the results? Most of the time you can’t know the actual probability of events being predicted even after they happen, and so it’s apples and oranges. If you predict that it will rain on Friday, and I predict an alien invasion before Christmas, and both actually happen… Does that mean I was smarter because my event was vastly more unlikely? How would you score these two successful predictions and wh…

It would atleast show both of you are good in your respective fields. Also the predictions could be mild in nature since everything is based on hunch, we want the guy who gets the best hunches.

Re: 'Ray, this is a religion': How Bridgewater lost two top hires

#118

Post by nitwit005 »

diegof79 wrote: post #79
throw3823423 wrote: post #63

I worked with Ferrucci in BW. The internals of the employee rating system that preceded him were hilarious. In short: Everyone is encouraged to rate anyone else in a variety of categories, as often as possible. Every rating is public. You know who is rating you, and how they did it. Those ratings are put together to get a score in every category, and can be seen by anyone. It's your Baseball Card. The problem is that…

I'm surprised by your comment. It's a basic knowledge of getting feedback in UX research or any social research that social pressure influences your response. That's why most feedback surveys are anonymous. Even in politics, there is an old theory called the Spiral of Silence on how people shut down their contrarian opinions in public. It looks like Ray's fixation on "radical transparency" ignored the basics of human…

Unfortunately, no one will trust that a work survey is anonymous. They sent it to an email address that includes my name, with a unique link. And it's often possible to just infer who it is.

Re: 'Ray, this is a religion': How Bridgewater lost two top hires

#119

Post by groby_b »

TheCleric wrote: post #115
yen223 wrote: post #41

"Dalio would often review the results in his office ... chewing on Scotch tape, as was his habit when he was concentrating..." This article really buried the lede here

Yeah the rest of it can be chalked up as narcissistic business personality, but this? This is psychotic. A billionaire chewing on scotch tape.

You can dislike billionaires without making questionable ad-hoc diagnoses disconnected from actual knowledge about the disorder. Chewing scotch tape is many things, "out of the usual" certainly being one of them, but it's nowhere close to diagnostic criteria for psychosis.

Re: 'Ray, this is a religion': How Bridgewater lost two top hires

#120

Post by lotsofpulp »

lawlessone wrote: post #83
yen223 wrote: post #41

"Dalio would often review the results in his office ... chewing on Scotch tape, as was his habit when he was concentrating..." This article really buried the lede here

It's too weird to make up.

Maybe it is product placement (advertising). If a popular personality has an interview, they can reach out to an ad agency (or vice versa) and be asked if they want to do something weird during the interview with a brand name product that would get people talking.
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